PIOTR WROTE:
<<Vulgar Latin -- the latter being a cover term for a whole family of
provincially
differentiated "Latins" used by the uneducated or poorly educated classes
(that is, by the overwhelming majority of Latin-speakers). It was the popular
dialects, with their nonstandard and absorbed "barbarian" features, that
eventually gave rise to the Romance languages. If you have no access to a
handbook of Romance linguistics, here's a small discussion of it at:
http://www.orbilat.com/Proto-Romance/Proto-Romance.html
>>
Piotr, did you see the trees on this website? It has simply "Latin" as the
single parent giving rise to two branches -- "Proto-Romance" and "Classical
Latin". "Vulgar Latin" is identified as a lower node, "Proto-Western
Romance", with all of Romance deriving above from "Proto-Romance", and
"Classical Latin" being an isolated branch-off.
In any case, reconstructing a parent from modern Romance languages without
using knowledge of either "Latin" or "Classical Latin" would seem to be a
dandy reality check for the comparative method, if it were possible. I would
think that a lot of the changes that are apparent with hindsight would not be
so obvious in a blind-fold test. The accusative < nominative displacement
would not have been easy to detect, for example, and
I suspect it would have been difficult to reconstruct the nominative in
Classical Latin or its presumably similar "Latin" parent.
Thank you, BTW, for explaining and supplying all this good stuff on Romance.
PIOTR ALSO WROTE:
<<more likely some of the oldest dialects vanished forever without leaving
any offspring, and the boundaries of others were affected by waves of
diffusion leading to areal convergence at a time when IE (or most of it) was
still a continuous network of dialects. Some of the original variation
perhaps survives in the daughter languages, but it's mixed with secondary
variation of more recent origin. Still, no living language is homogeneous,
and it would be naive to imagine that we'll ever arrive at some kind of
"standard PIE" through comparative reconstruction.>>
Let me put a slightly different scenario to you. The early loan.
We've reached the stage where PIE's dialects have lost mutual
comprehensibilty and therefore might be called THREE distinct languages.
PIE Jr.(A) is essentially unchanged from PIE. PIE Jr(B) is changed a bit.
PIE Jr(C)is changed a bit more. A new word is innovated or borrowed from
non-IE by PIE Jr(C). This innovation is a word for a horse -- lets call it
<ekWos>. The word is borrowed by PIE Jr(A) and (B). Let say there was
nothing in the sounds of the word that would cause it to change during
borrowing. Let's say all the specific sound changes that might affect the
word in the individual languages happen after the borrowing. And that the
word in all its later expected forms survives in ALL the attested daughter
languages
Am I wrong in assuming that this word would show up comparatively as being
from the PIE parent?
Steve